Skip to main content.
  • Faculty + Staff
  • Alumni/ae
  • Families
  • Students
Bard
  • Bard
  • Academics sub-menuAcademics
    • Academics
      • Programs and Divisions
      • Structure of the Curriculum
      • Courses
      • Requirements
      • Academic Calendar
      • Faculty
      • College Catalogue
      • Bard Abroad
      • Libraries
      • Dual-Degree Programs
      • Bard Conservatory of Music
      • Other Study Opportunities
      • Graduate Programs
      • Early Colleges
  • Admission sub-menuAdmission
    • Applying
      • Apply Now
      • Financial Aid
      • Tuition + Payment
      • Campus Tours
      • Meet Our Students + Alumni/ae
      • For Families / Para Familias
      • Join Our Mailing List
      • Contact Us
  • Campus Life sub-menuCampus Life
    • Living on Campus
      • Housing + Dining
      • Campus Resources
      • Get Involved on Campus
      • Visiting + Transportation
      • Athletics + Recreation
      • Montgomery Place Campus
      • Current Students
      • New Students
  • Civic Engagement sub-menuCivic Engagement
    • Bard CCE The Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) at Bard College embodies the fundamental belief that education and civil society are inextricably linked.

      Take action.
      Make an impact.

      • Campus + Community
      • In the Classroom
      • U.S. Network
      • International Network
      • About CCE
      • Support
      • Get Involved
  • Newsroom sub-menuNews + Events
    • News + Events
      • Newsroom
      • Events Calendar
      • Press Releases
      • Office of Communications
    • Special Events
      • Family and Alumni/ae Weekend
      • Commencement + Reunion
      • Fisher Center + SummerScape
      • Athletic Events
    • Join the Conversation
      •         

  • About Bard sub-menuAbout Bard
    • About Bard College
      • Bard History
      • Campus Tours
      • Employment
      • Visiting Bard
      • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
      • Sustainability
      • Title IX and Nondiscrimination
      • Board of Trustees
      • Bard Abroad
      • Open Society University Network
      • The Bard Network
  • Give
  • Search
Bard Middle Eastern Studies
Main Image for Events

Events

MES Menu
  • Requirements
  • Faculty
  • Languages
  • Study Abroad
  • Scholarly Resources
  • Students + Alumni/ae
  • Events
  • News
  • Home
Arabic and Hebrew language tables occur weekly during the semester. Join us for Hebrew every Monday at 6:00 p.m. in the President's Room at Kline, or for Arabic every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. in Kline Commons. Middle Eastern Studies also sponsors special academic and social events and encourages students to attend other campus events relating to the Middle East.

Archive of Past Events

2023
  
2022
  
2021
  
2020
  
2019
  
2018
  
2017
  
2016
  
2015
  
2014
  
2013
  
2012
  
2009


2023

  Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EST/GMT-5
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EST/GMT-5
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EST/GMT-5
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Tuesday, November 7, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EST/GMT-5
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Regional Reverberations of the War on Gaza
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  3:30 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
As the war on Gaza intensifies and potentially expands, the Middle East Studies Program invites the Bard community to learn about its reverberations across the region, particularly in Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey. The short presentations will be followed by ample time for audience questions. This event features: Ziad Dallal, Ibrahim Elhoudaiby, and Pinar Kemerli.


Download: Regional-Poster.pdf
  Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Nathan Thrall and Abed Salama, Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:15 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
We are very happy to welcome Nathan Thrall to Bard for a conversation between him and Abed Salama, the protagonist of Thrall's book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (Metropolitan Books). This event is sponsored by the Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies Programs. You can read and listen to an excerpt from the book here.

In his book, the struggle over Israel-Palestine is rendered at the human scale through the terrible story of a school bus accident that killed Abed’s five-year-old son Milad. Placing the personal narrative in the context of structural forces, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama elucidates the daily injustices faced by the roughly 3.2 million Palestinians living in the West Bank. Richly reported and deeply researched, the book cuts through the abstractions of 'the conflict' and 'the occupation' with a visceral and bracing account of an apparently exceptional event that reveals the painful realities of everyday life for Palestinians.

We have been planning this event for months, but it now takes on special relevance given the unfolding events in the Gaza Strip. As a recent review in the Guardian put it, "it feels hard to recommend reading material against such a backdrop, but a book such as A Day in the Life of Abed Salama brims over with just the sort of compassion and understanding that is needed at a time like this. ... Thrall looks at the Israel/Palestine conflict with unflinching clarity and quiet anger, but above all, with nuance. At a time when facts have become weapons in this seemingly endless conflict, this is a book that speaks with deep and authentic truth of ordinary lives trapped in the jaws of history."

Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan, 2017), and has written extensively on the region in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project. He lives in Jerusalem.

Abed Salama is a Palestinian living under Israeli rule in the enclave of Anata in greater Jerusalem. Salama’s story of losing his five-year-old son Milad in a harrowing school bus accident provides the framework for Thrall’s depiction of Israel/Palestine.


  Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Politics of Literature and Translation In the Novels of Bachtyar Ali
Guest lecturers Kareem Abdulrahman and Bachtyar Ali
Hegeman 201  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Politics has at least two faces in the works of Iraqi Kurdish novelist Bachtyar Ali. While his characters are in a constant search to prove their humanity, politics often appears as a barrier in that search. In The Last Pomegranate Tree, for example, a meditation on fatherhood is intertwined with the discovery of increasing corruption in political leadership. Why does salvation seem to fall beyond politics? Given the recent history of Iraqi Kurdistan, what is the significance of politics in literature? Yet another face is the politics of literature: Kurdish language has lived on the margins of the more dominant languages in the Middle East for centuries. In this context, literary translation could be seen as an effort to put the Kurds, the largest minority group without their own nation state, on the cultural map of the world. Here the expression that the translator is a “traitor” may ring hollow when the translator appears first of all as an activist with loyalties. What then are the politics of translating Kurdish literature in the contemporary world? This event invites conversation and reflection with a novelist and his translator.


  Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


  Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Arabic Table 
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  6:50 pm – 7:50 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.


Wednesday, April 12, 2023
“A Body Without a Soul:” Juliana Seraphim and Palestinian Art in 1970s Beirut
Dr. Alessandra Amin, University of Pennsylvania
Olin 102  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
“The galleries of Beirut are becoming a body without a soul,” wrote Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata in 1970, “for the soul was set free in the streets and in the [refugee] camps.” The Lebanese capital was at once a beacon of cosmopolitanism and a tangle of sectarian divisions, its visual culture increasingly fractured along sociopolitical lines. To the right of the political spectrum were “the galleries” of the anti-Palestinian, Christian East, filled with bourgeois, apolitical paintings; to the left were “the streets” of the Muslim West––including the Palestinian camps––where images of freedom fighters papered walls and dominated exhibitions. Like all artworlds under pressure, though, Beirut’s visual landscape was more complex than it appeared at first glance. This talk focuses on the work of Juliana Seraphim (1934- 2005), a Palestinian-born bonne vivante whose status as a middle-class Christian granted her Lebanese citizenship and enabled her assimilation into Beirut’s commercial art scene. Illegible in both Palestinian nationalist and Lebanese sectarian terms, Seraphim channeled her experience of exile into fantastical, hybrid forms that embrace the feminine and the grotesque in equal measure. Troubling binary distinctions between “committed” Palestinian art and its “apolitical” Lebanese foil, this talk examines the triangulation of deliberate frivolity, nonreproductive sexuality, and exilic subjectivity that animates a rich corpus of Seraphim’s work from the late 1960s and 1970s.

Alessandra Amin received her doctorate in art history from UCLA in 2022 and is currently the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow in Palestine Studies at Columbia University. She is working on her first book project, Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State, which considers the emergence of the dream and the maternal body as nested modes of relating to Palestine in art made during the heyday of the Palestinian Revolution (1965-1982). During the 2023–2024 academic year, she will be an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.


  Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Teach-In: The Earthquake in Turkey & Syria
Olin Humanities, Room 102  3:30 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us on Tuesday, March 14, from 3:30–4:30 pm in Olin 102 for a teach-in to take stock of the earthquake(s) and their continued devastation in various parts of Turkey and Syria. 

Panelists include Lara Fresko Madra (Fellow at OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts), Pinar Kemerli (Assistant Professor of Political Studies), and Ziad Abu-Rish (Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies; CHRA MA Director).

Topics include:
—The nature and scope of the earthquake(s).
—The differential devastation across various regions and communities.
—The local, regional, and international dynamics of responding.
—Political legacies and fallout surrounding this and past earthquakes.

We will distribute a sample list of places to donate and/or keep up with the relevant news during the event and make it available to share via email for those that cannot attend.

This teach-in is supported by the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, the Human Rights Project, and the Middle Eastern Studies Program.



Scholarly Resources

  • ArabLit
  • Jadaliyya
Bard College
30 Campus Road
PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504-5000
Phone: 845-758-6822
Admission E-mail: [email protected]
©2023 Bard College
Follow Us on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Follow Us on Instagram
Threads
You Tube
Information For:
Prospective Students
Current Employees
Alumni/ae 
Families
Quick Links
Employment
Travel to Bard
Site Search
Support Bard
COVID-19 Info
Bard IT Policies & Security